ICO hits Yahoo with £250k penalty over 2014, 2016 breaches

The UK arm of once and former search giant Yahoo!, whose parent US operation was recently rebranded to Altaba following its acquisition by communications company Verizon, has received a £250,000 penalty from the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) for security breaches disclosed in 2016.

Now, approaching two years after the first breach was disclosed, the Information Commission's Office (ICO) has weighed in with a £250,000 penalty - half the maximum penalty permissible by the Data Protection Act 1998, the law ICO opted to apply against the 2014 breach - for Yahoo UK Services Limited, the UK arm of the company now known as Altaba.

In its announcement of the penalty, an ICO representative summarised the investigation's findings as including that the company 'failed to take appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect the data of 515,121 customers against exfiltration by unauthorised persons; the company failed to take appropriate measures to ensure that its data processor – Yahoo Inc – complied with the appropriate data protection standards; it also failed to ensure appropriate monitoring was in place to protect the credentials of Yahoo employees with access to Yahoo customer data; [and] the inadequacies found had been in place for a long period of time without being discovered or addressed.'